Engineering Ladders Linklist

Written by Benjamin Reitzammer on Jul 11, 20165 minute read

Sometime in summer 2015, when preparing yearly feedbacks for my team at
vaamo, I started formulating our team’s (engineering) ladder. Back
then the concept of a ladder, the act of spelling out what the requirements and
expectations for a specific role and position are, was pretty new to me. Still
it immediately appealed to me.

And while working on vaamo’s ladder I came across many more ladders, many of
them inspired by RTR’s ladder, or inspired to be shared by RTR’s sharing.

After a while, keeping tabs on all those published ladders became nearly
impossible. Yet, I found it very inspiring and helpful to have a list of
resources in the spirit of “that’s how others do it”, in order to pick and
choose what works best for our case.

So in order to make it easier to get inspired by other companies’ engineering
ladders, I decided to put together a complete list of all published engineering
ladders.

When using any of the below ladders as a starting point, be aware, that you’ll
need quite a bit of effort to adapt and develop your own understanding of what
the roles’ and positions’ classifications mean for you and your organization.

When looking at some of the other ladders, this is the one that kicked off many
if not most of them to be shared.

I find it very well structured, approachable and it reveals deep thinking behind
it. I especially liked the concept of the four pillars “Technical Skill”,
“Get Stuff Done”, “Impact”, “Communication & Leadership”.

Urban Airship’s ladder covers engineers’ and operations’ paths as well as the
respective manager ladders.

Similar to RTR’s ladder, Urban Airship’s organizes the
expectations towards each engineering and ops level around the concept of four
pillars, namely “Domain Knowledge”, “Teaching and Mentoring”, “Culture and
Leadership” and “Customer Success”. Notice the absence of anything
“Technical” from this list of pillars.
Management positions are described using three pillars “Scope and Impact”,
“Team Development” and “Customer Success”.

It provides a lot of context about how engineering in general is structured at
Intent Media and all positions are described in a concise yet extensive prose.
It’s very well structured, offers a lot of inspiration and conveys deep thinking
that lead towards the ladder.

Chartbeat’s ladder is also built around four pillars, namely
“Responsibilities”, “Expertise”, “Qualities” and “Objectives”.
Furthermore it’s actually three different ladders for the paths Backend,
Frontend/Design and Data Science.

The descriptions are very compact, thus require probably quite some effort in
communicating and to create a shared understanding. Which of course is not
necessarily a bad thing, as it’s nearly impossible to formulate a ladder that
doesn’t trigger or even requires a discussion around it’s assumptions and
definitions.

Charles is CTO at Koho and shared his ladder.
“His” in the sense of “no company is specifically mentioned in the blog post”.

It’s extra helpful, as it contains specific reasoning in which circumstances
titles are helpful or maybe even necessary, and why it’s a bad idea to have
a ladder where the top technical level is something like “Senior Software
Engineer”.

Honorary mention for the infamous ladder by Joel Spolsky which dates back to the
year 2009 and is probably one of the first publicly shared engineering ladders.

Compared to the more recently shared ladders, it has a completely different
approach and is the only one in this list, where “years of experience” is
a measure of sorts. Which in my opinion, simply isn’t appropriate anymore. Go
watch Konstantin’s explanation of how
a better way to think about an employee’s value contribution to a company looks
like.

So just to be clear: Don’t base your ladder this one, as there are better ways
to arrive at compensation levels than “years of experience”.

Last year, we identified a need to redefine the career framework for our
software engineers within the UK engineering teams and started work on a
Capgemini Software Engineering grade ladder. The grade ladder is our team’s
self-produced documentation to enable everyone, both inside and outside our
team, to understand our ethos and values and what’s expected of them.